


Maqqaba

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Chanukah, Gen, Jewish Howard Stark, Judaism, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 20:10:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9012295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: Chanukah in the SSR.





	

Peggy's first Christmas season in New York is both delightful and depressing - it's so lovely to see America's bounty and good cheer on such vivid display, especially after how England spent the last few Christmases. But she misses her family and she even misses the way misery and fear of the Jerries so close by made every bright spot shine all the more. Her own preoccupation (self-absorption, if she must be honest) leaves her only surprised and curious when the candelabra appears in the one window in the main lab that's not bricked over from the outside. It's high up - they're underground, after all - and needs a ladder to get to, although they keep a ladder handy because this is a lab with chemicals and there are times when extra ventilation is ideal. The candelabra is not a fine one; it's tarnished silver of a low quality, battered and dented, and Peggy's embarrassed that she has to be told that it's a chanukia and not someone's odd attempt at giving the lab a touch of class for the Christmas season. 

Gloria, who is the one to tell her, does not know whose it is. 

Most of the scientists are Jews here, but their relationship with their faith is complicated and Peggy generally chooses to say nothing lest she inadvertently poke at a sore spot. And that goes for Howard, who views his Jewishness as an annoying childhood nickname he can't get rid of, as much as it is for Abe or any of the other refugees who have lost everything - up to and including their families - because of it. Yiddish might be the unofficial second language of Project Rebirth and the lab was unofficially closed in the fall for the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, but most of the men work into the night on Fridays and the biggest dogmatic disagreements usually end up being about food - what is the appropriate method of preparation of a brisket, not whether Walker should eat his ham sandwich at his workstation. 

The chanukia appeared on a Tuesday and nobody says a word about it, not even when it is joined by a second one on Thursday. This one is brass, sturdier but flecked with old wax of many colors. Again, nobody claims responsibility and nobody asks. On Friday a third appears, requiring all of them to be staggered at slight angles because they don't quite fit end to end. There is a fourth in the break room window when Peggy goes to make tea mid-morning (because she is the only one who will not put a coffee pot on a Bunsen burner to save the walk). The break room is up a flight of stairs and so the window is at a more normal height, but it is heavily barred from the outside. 

She doesn't even blink when it, too, is filled up with two more on Monday morning. Or when an entire carton of boxes of candles appears on the 'common property' table after lunch. Or when it is Abe who grabs the first box of candles and mounts the ladder in the late afternoon. He is wearing his hat and puts two candles in identical positions in all three of the chanukias before taking one from the first and climbing back down and handing it to Shapiro, who lights it for him on the open flame at the nearest table and hands it back. Abe's voice as he speak-sings what Peggy presumes are the appropriate prayers (three separate ones that get a murmur at the conclusion of each by those watching below) is clear but hesitant, like he knows the words but isn't used to speaking them. Then he climbs down the ladder, takes off his hat, and returns to what he was doing as if he'd simply gone for a drink of water. 

Shapiro mounts the ladder next, retrieves a candle from the brass menorah, and repeats the action. Then Ziegel. And then Mittelman and Ginsburg start arguing about how much electricity is too much to intentionally send through a man's body and, just like that, it goes back to being a typical Monday afternoon at the lab. And so it goes every workday evening for the next week, sans the fanfare of the first night - someone loads the candles during the day and then, come sundown, Abe, Shapiro, and Ziegel mount the ladder with a lit candle. The same goes on in the break room, although Peggy's never gone over to witness it. 

Which is why it's not until Thursday that she finds out that the charming silver chanukia on the left in the break room window is Howard's. It is clearly meant for a child, with tiny animals bearing each candle holder on their backs or in their arms, and it is not new for all that it is gleaming as the result of the finest of polishings. She wonders what possessed him to dig it out of wherever it had been since he packed away little Howie Stark's life on the Lower East Side. The closest she maybe comes is when she hears Abe explaining to Doris that Jewish holidays 'come in two varieties - someone tried to kill us and they succeeded, so we starve ourselves for a day, or someone tried to kill us and failed, so we eat a lot. Chanukah is a victory, but not such a large victory that we are supposed to go to synagogue for it. But it's supposed to be a miraculous victory because a tiny group defeated a large army and then somehow got eight days of use out of one day's worth of oil. Now, personally, I think this was probably good resource management and not divine action, but, still. If you're going to pick a symbolic example for our little group, you could do worse."

It's the following Tuesday evening when they get a visitor from Washington, escorted by Colonel Phillips, who starts shouting about the bright lights visible from outside and how that's a complete defeat of the whole purpose of a secret lab and it's a safety hazard as well as a security hazard and Peggy can see the Colonel roll his eyes and drags the congressional aide over to the corner behind where she is sitting trying to organize Abe's candidate files into 'likely' and 'aspirational.' 

"Everyone in the neighborhood thinks it's a sweatshop down here," the Colonel explains in the particular slow fashion he has when he believes he's talking to ambulatory morons. "How do you think we cover up how many deliveries we get and how many people are going to and fro? So it's a Jewish sweatshop, big deal. These guys all look like they could be tailors, anyway."

The chanukias are all gone the next day, but that's because the holiday is over, although the Washington interloper is preening as though he's imposed his will upon the group. The following year, they come out again and there is possibly a little jostling for position because there are only so many windows that actually face the outside, which by this time Peggy understands to be a prerequisite. 

The December after that, they are in London setting up the SSR's European headquarters, which is full of analysts and not scientists and there are Christmas decorations and people yelling at each other in English and Peggy feels far less at home than she thought she'd be with her parents a short drive away. She misses the comfort of the Brooklyn lab, the people and the respect they'd given her that she now has to fight for anew. She misses Abe deeply, his wry calm in any storm and determination to take delight where he could find it, and has not quite finished mourning his death because she cannot quite forgive herself for not stopping it. She misses Steve despite wanting not to because he is currently barnstorming for USO bonds by day and being bedded by starlets by night if his handler's reports are the least bit accurate. She even misses Howard, although she'll be seeing him next week because the SSR's London bunker will have a science division and Howard will be nominally running it. 

Howard's arrival is prefaced by walls of boxes piling up in the space that will be his domain, each one labeled with warnings of various degrees of disaster that will result if they are jostled or dropped. (Peggy's favorite is the one that assure that whoever breaks the contents of the crate in question will smell like a fart for a month.) His actual arrival is like a celebrity visit - which it actually is, to be fair - disrupting everything and distracting everyone as he tosses out packs of Pall Malls and other American treats not readily found on this side of the Atlantic. 

Howard's gift to her is a box full of stockings and chocolates and a tin full of the almond cookies from the bakery around the corner from the lab in Brooklyn. And one slightly dented silver chanukia, polished but not perfected in any other way from what Abe had put in the window. 

"There was nobody else to give it to," he explains when she turns up at his workbench with it in hand. That's a lie and they both know it. "You were his absolute favorite shikse," he adds, which is not a lie and part of the reason Peggy still feels guilty for letting Abe down by not protecting him better. "And because he'd agree that you are a Maccabee in every way that counts." 

Howard does her the favor of not noticing her eyes fill up with tears. 

She has to ask Grossman when the holiday starts and there are more than a few comments when the chanukia appears on her desk on the appropriate day. They are in an underground bunker and even if it there were windows, the blackout restrictions would have made it impossible. Not to mention that the attention it would have brought would have been more problematic than in Brooklyn because they are far from where any London Jews live in numbers. She doesn't intend to light it at all, she just wants it out to honor Abe's memory, but a box of candles is on her desk when she returns from tea. Howard's back in the States, so she has no idea who'd have left them until past six and the Colonel walks by. 

"You gonna use that thing?" he asks gruffly. "Those candles can get you a steak dinner at the Mayfair if not." 

She shoots him a look that asks if he is the donor and he shakes his head slightly to indicate that he's not - but that he sticks around while she opens the box perhaps means that he's not completely uninvolved. 

Tucked inside the lid is a note in Howard's scrawl. "Rogers isn't Abe's only light still burning in the darkness." 

She doesn't know what the prayers are, doesn't think they're appropriate to say if she did, but she knows which spots to put the candles in. 

"We can't make it up to him," the Colonel says as he walks away. "But we can still do right by him." 


End file.
